My first taste of North Korean food came soon after crossing the border into the country from the Chinese city of Dandong. The train had pulled into the station at Sinuiju, and ranks of customs officers were meticulously checking paperwork and going through our luggage. The Chinese woman sitting opposite me, born in North Korea but now splitting her time between Dandong and Pyongyang, had received a package of food from her brother-in-law, who had picked it up from a Sinuiju restaurant. 

As the train left the station, she offered to share it. The kimbap rolls were soft and succulent, laver seaweed skins enclosing cool rice seasoned deliciously with sesame oil and flecked with morsels of beef, egg, carrot and other titbits. We ate them on the five-hour journey to Pyongyang, watching the unfolding landscape, the fields mostly bare in early spring, the hills deforested, the roads empty.

Often we glimpsed huge political posters looming over village squares, and exclamatory red-and-white slogans pegged out in the fields, flanked by red flags. The smooth, hyper-real faces of the late leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il beamed out from every public building. This was more than a year ago, long before the most recent outbreak of threats and missiles.